039. ...attack of the heavy pneumatic ram...
(microfiction)
This was written mid Lockdown and originally published in a book of short stories published by the Portobello Book Festival. Social context has, thankfully, changed but y’know, cast your mind back.
Allotment.
Beyond the building site hoardings, a pile driver punches steel through soil forcing a jarring collision with the bedrock below and bringing to mind John’s allotment. Driving a brand new spade into the soil that first spring, he’d cracked into rocks like a prisoner on hard labour. Now the juddering vibrations invade his knees through pavement and leather soles rather than mud caked wellies.
He smells the mineral dust in the air (the old nose still works Jock!) while the ACK! ACK! ACK! attack of the heavy pneumatic ram assaults his ears. Insult heaped upon insult.
Katie’s runners will be dying on their trellis, dried out by neglect and what counts as a summer these days. Potatoes going to seed in the ground. The fruits of their labours, alone and untended, at the mercy of the weather and the wildlife.
We should be pruning back the summer berry bushes and getting spring onion and radish in the ground, John thinks to himself.
“To hell in a hand cart” he mutters aloud to no one.
There are those of them, the allotment crowd, who’ve returned to their plots. Braving the shared barrows and communal water taps. A couple of months back, as lockdown lifted, John had packed up pieces and a flask in his kitbag and walked the mile up the road, ready to tear into the weeds and wandering growth he felt sure would have suffocated their wee patch.
But by the green gate at the end of the road, the first warning sign was writ large. A dozen bikes chained to the railings. Tag-a-longs clamped to parental seat posts, cross bar baby seats and circus sized miniature children’s bikes in bright reds, greens and yellows, like cherry tomatoes on a vine.
He could hear them beyond the high hedge. The laughing, shouting children, the young families. And though he couldn’t yet see them, their snotty noses and sticky hands had been clear as day in his mind’s eye. He could see a rainbow trapped within a hosepipe’s mist, while germs leapt from fingertip to gate latch where they awaited his own hands, face, nose, lungs, home, Katie.
He turned back toward her. “Brings a new meaning to having lost the plot, aye old man?”
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